I’m such a perfectionist

Music (00:00:00) – She is dreaming, she is drifting. Never been so wide awake. Captured in the moment by the beauty all around her. There’s nowhere else that she would rather be.

Koren (00:00:19) – Hello and welcome. This is Koren Motekaitis. And you’re listening to How She Really Does It, the place where inspiration and possibility meet. The other day I was talking with a successful entrepreneur. He’s in his late 30s, built a successful business, and is thriving both personally and professionally. Money’s flowing in. He’s married, has a good life. So, you know, it’s so cool, right? Now, here’s the thing. As we’re talking about it, it was really vulnerable for him to own it. And this is an example of, as Brené Brown says, joy is the most vulnerable feeling that we can have, right? We’re afraid if we really embrace it, the other shoe’s going to drop. Well, here’s the thing. The other shoe will drop. And it’s not because we embrace the joy.

Koren (00:01:12) – It’s because that is the truth about life. We’re going to go through life. There’s going to be periods of good things, and then there’s going to be periods of difficult things. And there can be good things in a day and a shit show also in the day. And that is why I came up with that concept of I live an amazing life and there are shit shows everywhere. That’s just part of life, the amazing life and the shit shows and even the boring and the dull. It’s all in there. It’s a continuum, right? And they’re not two places to be. It’s a continuum. So he was telling me, you know, on his way home, even though, like, 20 really good things happened at work, he still stuck with that one bad thing. And he was trying to justify it as like, well, you know, I’m such a perfectionist. And I said, well, how’s that working for you? And he goes, well, I beat myself up because of that one thing and I just can’t hold on to those 20 good things.

Koren (00:02:06) – And one of the reasons for this, just to give you a behind the scenes, is our brains have a negativity bias. It’s to keep us alive. It’s a survival instinct. Now here’s the thing. He doesn’t need to survive, right? He’s thriving. He’s got this business of success. Things are going really well. He doesn’t need to survive. And there may be shit shows or problems or things that happen that need to be worked on. Challenges to overcome, things that maybe weren’t seen before. Maybe it’s a new learning, right? Maybe there was a mistake. And when you have a lot of employees, right, there’s a lot to manage with that. When you have customers, there’s a lot to manage with that. So he would beat himself up, but he no longer needs to survive. And really it’s about thriving. And that’s something to when we get out of this old conditioning of I need to survive. But really, do we need to survive or do we need to work on thriving? And thriving doesn’t mean that we never have problems.

Koren (00:03:05) – That’s magical thinking, right? We think once I get established, once my career is going great, once I’m married, whatever the promised land is, once my kids go off to college, right, it’s going to be great. We’re going to be able to thrive. There aren’t going to be any more problems. There will always be shit shows, my friend.

Koren (00:03:24) – Right. There will always be. And we have to check in and be like, is this something I have to address right now? Is it that much of an emergency? Do I have the capacity for it? Is this something that can be handled in another day? Is this my problem to even solve? Right. We need to ask a lot of questions.

Koren (00:03:38) – So this beating yourself up is really it’s an old conditioning that we’ve had. It’s part of our cultural programming. Let’s beat ourselves up because that’s how we change stuff. That’s how we can be humble. That’s how we can not be too much. Because man, we’re really successful right now.

Koren (00:03:55) – And if I own that, then I’m going to get too big for my britches, right? Which is another way of I’m too much, which is the same as I’m not enough, which is all rooted in shame. Right? So that fear of like, oh, let me, let me put myself down, let me judge myself, let me beat myself up so that I don’t get too big for myself. Right? And I can be humble, but the beating ourselves up, that doesn’t work right. And it’s actually not the way that we create change, especially lasting change. The other thing that is part of the old condition is we have this magical thinking of, once I fixed this problem, then I won’t have any other problems and I can finally get time to appreciate my life and those 20 really good things. How many of you do that? Like, okay, once I get through this, then I’ll finally get there, right? And I have clients that say this to me all the time.

Koren (00:04:43) – It’s like, okay, I just have to get through this, you know? And it’s like, well, when are we going to celebrate? The good? And the celebration of the good doesn’t mean it has to be a big party. Doesn’t mean there has to be a big stop. It could be like, wow, isn’t this really cool? The ability to own my own business, to own my own company, and for it to be thriving and to have it running really well and be successful at it on the terms of my success, like, isn’t that really cool? What does that take, 20 seconds to say that acknowledge that, allow it to incorporate inside of you and it’s free and it can be a conversation you have with yourself, right? It can be something you can write down and acknowledge. It can be a story you share with a trusted confidant. Right? Not somebody who’s going to weaponize it with you or tell you you’re too much or you’re being too cocky. Right? But who is that person? And we don’t do that, and that’s what we need to do.

Koren (00:05:34) – Instead of the magical thinking of once you don’t have problems, you can have time to do that. There will always be problems. There are always be shit shows and there’s always stuff to deal with. Right? And the other aspect too that’s really important is like for him, the bird’s eye view, everybody else looking at him on the outside, they’re like, wow, he’s got this great life, right? And isn’t it easy and fantastic? And it could look like that. You know, his business operates without him because he has flexibility. He has freedom as a leader. But in the weeds of it, if you’re really to see what’s going on, there’s also a lot of responsibility. There’s the challenges. Every one of my clients, it doesn’t matter what industry, what salary point, what level of professionalism, whether it’s entry level to high level executives, one of the big challenges with every one of my clients and all these different industries across the world has to do with employees, right? There’s a lot of challenges with employees, and I’m not saying it’s a bad thing, but there’s difficulties, human behavior and what we bring in as leaders, what people bring in as employees can be challenges.

Koren (00:06:47) – So the bird’s eye view is like, wow, he lives this great life and he’s on easy street and he’s just making all this money. The living in the weeds is there’s a lot going on and there’s a lot of responsibility. And he can be grateful it’s not either or. It’s an and and he can. There’s a lot of awesomeness in his business as well. So letting go of this negativity bias, letting go of this beating ourselves up and this which is survival instinct, he doesn’t need to survive. In fact, it’s an opportunity to really thrive. And yes, when he was still first building his business, he worked a lot. There was a lot of risk. There was a lot of uncertainty. Didn’t you know, it could have financially been very detrimental for him, right. Because there was some money that was needed in the beginning of his business to be able to do it and building systems. And was this going to really work? So there was a lot of that. But he’s no longer in that position where he needs to survive.

Koren (00:07:47) – He can thrive. And sometimes people worry about like, oh, if I get into thriving, then I’m going to be soft. No, that’s not the case. As long as we’re aware and we practice and we and we can learn and challenge ourselves because there’s going to be challenges. Because most of my clients, we like to learn. It’s hardwired in us. Right? We’re not just like, oh, I’m going to be on easy street. So there is going to be growth that happens. It just it doesn’t have to be growth. Maybe every single day. We don’t have to have our backs up against the wall. So I want to talk about the cost of perfection. Right. Because he was like, oh, I’m such a perfectionist. And sometimes my clients will wear this as a badge of honor, like, oh, I’m a perfectionist, right? That’s a really good thing. I have this really high standard. Here’s the thing. Perfectionism is the birthplace of shame. And this was the breathtaking research from Brené Brown.

Koren (00:08:38) – You know, a long time ago, well over a decade ago, when she started talking about this, because until then, we all use, like, perfectionism as badges of honor, even though back in the day, Hannah Montana, the character from Miley Cyrus played in, had a song that said Nobody’s Perfect, right? So she was trying to teach us to unlearn this perfectionism thing that we had all grown accustomed to. But now that we know that perfectionism is the birthplace of shame, right? And when we’re rooted in shame, we can grow stuff and we can really work hard, but it’s going to be pretty toxic of what we’re growing. So here’s an example of how the cost of perfection like with this entrepreneur. Right. So one of the things is when he goes home at night and talks with his wife, he tells her this negative thing, right? And that’s what he’s bringing into that space. And remember I talk about Joe Taylor saying, be responsible for the energy you bring into a space.

Koren (00:09:32) – And this gets complicated because we’ve also learned that we’re not supposed to go it alone. We’re supposed to be vulnerable with people in the right to hear the story. All of that is true. When we’re coming home at night. And our spouses also had a long day, and they’ve had their own great things and shit shows, and they have their own negativity bias and their old ways of like surviving versus thriving. And we talk about this, and then you talk about the cultural programming that women have being responsible for their spouses emotional well-being. This can lead to further shit shows, right? That can be the cost of the spouse being dumped on our only hearing this one aspect and not hearing the other 20 and going oh no, is this going to be something of concern? Like will we be able to last? Will this business continue on? These are all the stories, we’re really good at making stories, right. And these are the stories that people create. So at some point what happens is it’s the death by a thousand cuts, whether it’s a death by a thousand cuts in the relationship or like with this entrepreneur, is yes, he’s in his late 30s now and it’s it’s going but at some point these small little cuts, this, this being hard on ourselves as beating ourselves up, this, you know, being such a perfectionist, it becomes a small cut.

Koren (00:10:46) – And then when they’re in their 50s, they’re like, screw this shit, I’m over it. I’m out. And they either self sabotage themselves or their business. They sell when they may not want to sell. Right. And cash out, which then can, you know, for some people it works, but sometimes it doesn’t work for people. I had a client a long time ago who, in his 30s, had made multiple millions of dollars and decided to retire early. Well, when he came to me in his 40s, the story in his head is, I don’t want to be the guy who made money in his 30s to lose it all. Later in my life, there was so much fear and shame around it. Even though he had enough money to last him the rest of his life, and he had the constraints and understanding of what could they spend and be okay, he went into a lot of scarcity around that. These are the examples of the death by a thousand cuts. It can happen to ourselves.

Koren (00:11:38) – It can happen to the people around us. And so it’s really important to know what the cost of this perfectionism is and how we can embrace it and be like holding it as like, this is a great look at me. It’s a great identity to have, but there’s a huge cost. So instead, it’s about getting comfortable, one with the vulnerability of embracing the good in our life. That’s really important for him to be able to say like, yeah, you know. And there was some perspective of he remembers when he first started out the business and how many people that they needed to have, right, how many customers and what that flow looked like and where they are now. I mean, it’s phenomenal, right where he’s gone from and where he’s gone to. And then questioning, does he want to open up another one right there? Yes, there could be more revenue. But he’s like, what would it be for? And that’s such a whole different concept for us, right. Because in America it is like, make more money, make more money, make more money.

Koren (00:12:31) – The question is, is that where you want to put more time and energy and attention to for making more money, or is it not? What is enough? Right. Those are really important questions to ask. So getting comfortable with the vulnerability of embracing the good in your life, that takes courage, right? Because we have this belief of if we embrace the good, typically the other shoe’s going to drop. Instead of realizing we can embrace the good so that we can resource ourself and fill ourselves up and be like, wow, look at this. I’ve got this thriving business. I get to do work that I care about. It’s aligned with my values. I have some great employees. Maybe I have some challenging employees. I have that I’m married, right? I have a great life partner. I’m doing really, really good. And there’s always going to be stuff on the horizon, right? Like we’re aging, we have aging parents. There’s going to be at some point loss, right? Especially when we have aging parents.

Koren (00:13:30) – There’s going to be some loss. There’s going to be difficult things. But to be able to really take it in and say, wow, life is really good right now. Look at what’s going on. We resource ourselves so that we have the capacity to be resilient when the hard things come. What we do culturally is we beat ourselves up and just make ourselves keep going. I’ve done this right, been a big survivor, you know, really embrace being tough and gritty, right? Grit has been such a huge buzzword over the last, I don’t know, 5 or 10 years being really gritty. And yes, I think that’s really important to be able to be gritty, but we don’t need to be gritty when it’s unnecessary suffering. And not resourcing ourselves so that we can have the ability to be greedy and by resourcing ourselves is really acknowledging what’s going well in our life. This is free. It doesn’t take much time. I did an example of it earlier in the show. You can speak it to yourself, you can speak it to a confidant, somebody who’s earned the right to hear your story, who’s not going to judge you or weaponize you, or throw it back in your face.

Koren (00:14:32) – You can write it down, right? It’s really important to embrace that so that you can be resilient when things become hard. Because here’s the thing. When we spend a life of beating ourselves up and keep going, when that difficult time comes in our life, we’re going to be pretty close to empty and have less ability to deal with the situation. And that is when you see the really, really bad behaviors, right? Maybe you remember your own. I have my own. I’ve been environments where people have done it and it’s like, Holy moly, right? So when people are not well resourced, they become not their best selves or their favorite selves. Not even saying perfect like we just become not good. And I think about back in my life when I was not well resourced and I was being more of a martyr, and I was trying to do it all and do it perfectly and all of that. And at some point it’s like a volcano that’s ready to go, right? That’s where the anger, the rage, the screw, this.

Koren (00:15:35) – I’m out of here. The quitting, leaving, right, happens. So a metaphor for this is our phones, our cell phones. Or if you have an electric car. Right. But we’ll go to the cell phones. We charge them. Typically, we charge our phones like we all have gotten into this habit or not all of us. But I’m in this habit of every night I put my phone on the charger. I charge it, make sure it’s full. If I have a day that’s going to be out and about, maybe I bring a battery pack with me because I know that my phone needs to be recharged. I’m still learning how to recharge myself, and I’m 51 years old and I’m a coach, and I’ve been doing this a long time. So if this is a new concept for you, and my invitation for you is to give yourself grace and to start learning that as well as unlearning that you can go without. We charge our phones, we charge our cars so we can keep going.

Koren (00:16:25) – Those are great metaphors for our own lives. Because here’s the thing. If you say, had a phone that wasn’t well charged and was like a 10% battery in, you’re in a city late at night, you’re realizing you’re walking in a part of town that’s not safe and you need to call an Uber, but you’re about to. Your phone’s battery is about to die. I guess it’d be less than 10% say it’s at 1%. You may or may not be able to call the Uber. This concept. Death by a thousand cuts. It’s such a great metaphor because it’s the small things that we think don’t matter and we can move on. So here’s the thing. Small things can be the death and small things can build to great success. Actually, it’s the small things that build a great success. We think it has to be these big hairy actions, right? But it’s the small steps that builds a success. So like I said earlier, we have people in our lives who are there to support us.

Koren (00:17:16) – Our spouses are high on that list. And right, there’s that learning about vulnerability and not going alone. Years ago, I had Jeff Opdyke on my show and oh my gosh, I loved Jeff Opdyke. He used to write a column in the Wall Street Journal. It’s called Love and Money, and I loved reading it every Sunday. I was in my 20s and stuff. And so when he got to be one of my first guests on the show, I was so excited. And I remember him telling the story because, you know, I think his wife was a nurse and he was a columnist, you know, personal finance columnist. And I remember he was sitting at the kitchen table and he I guess he balanced the checkbook and he said, oh, okay, we have $15,000 in our checking account. And this is like, you know, I think the late 90s, maybe early 2000. And his wife was washing the dishes and she got really mad and she, like, kind of grumbled and maybe threw down the sponge or something.

Koren (00:18:09) – And he’s like, what’s the matter? And she’s like, I keep working so hard. You’re working hard. And every time we turn around, all we have is $15,000 in our checking account. Why? Right? She felt defeated, she felt hopeless, and he realized she didn’t have the context of the whole situation. So that week he spent a couple of hours, got all their financial assets together and showed her their whole what their assets were and what their liabilities were and what their net worth was overall. And he sat down with her and it was about a 15 minute conversation. He walked her through it and she was like, oh, okay. And she was fine. And he goes, you’re okay. Go. She goes, well, now I know that it’s not just 15, like we’re working hard, but we’re always at the same. There’s actually growth. That’s an example of why it’s so important to share more than just the bad thing. Because what’s the story that your spouse or your confidant or your friend may be putting together for the other stories that they may not have, not only them, but ourselves? If we focus on just that one thing, the negative, we may be missing all these other aspects and not seeing the whole picture.

Koren (00:19:23) – And that’s really important. So those are examples of death by a thousand cuts, right? When we only talk about the one thing and over and over and like Jeff’s wife getting so mad thinking, well, you keep telling me we have 15,000 and in her brain is, why isn’t it growing? I guess we’re not doing enough, right? You may not know what the other person, how it’s impacting them, and that’s really important. The other side for this entrepreneur is how can he take care of himself in those small moments. We’ll also lead to the longevity career. Like he’s physically fit, he’s strong, he’s healthy, he does a lot of that stuff. So this is just a small area. It’s a small area because it’s the drive home where he’s beating himself up. But if he can work on cleaning that up because it’s not about doing it perfectly, it’s about learning, growing, nurturing ourselves so that we have the ability to make the sacrifices or go into surge when we need to. And instead of being perfect or being hard on ourselves, which is, again, that cultural programming.

Koren (00:20:27) – Of how we get to success, which isn’t true. It’s about working on thriving and being compassionate with ourselves. So how does this look on the right home? It looks like evaluating. Asking ourselves, hmm, what worked well today? What could be improved? And as you can see those two questions, there’s an accountability because it’s not oh, I’m just so fantastic. Everything was great without like missing the context of okay, there’s going to be areas of improvement, right. What can be improved. You know, most people think compassion means letting people get away with things or being soft. Remember, I have a client who used to be like current compassion as being soft. She was a C-suite exec. I’m like, compassion has boundaries. So what worked well today? What can be improved? And really being accountable to ourselves and the people we lead. Right? The people responsible for working towards that with a realistic time frame where sometimes we have so much magical thinking to overcome, right?

Koren (00:21:35) – And the world is set up because we’ve got Amazon and Google. I’ve used this example quite a bit this week with clients. Amazon has created magical thinking of how quickly something should be able to happen. Except there’s an infrastructure that I’m sure is like billions of dollars with incredible tech support that allows that to happen in a network of that where we can get something on our doorstep within a few hours. Right. And same thing with Google. We have a question. We go there, we may get an answer, but there’s a whole bunch of systems in place to create that answer. But that’s not how those timeframes really work in our real life. So when we can ask those questions, this leads to growth and learning, which is a growth mindset. And it does it without beating herself up and causing unnecessary suffering internally. And here’s the thing you may say, oh, but the people that I know that are really successful, they don’t show these things on the outside. You’re right. They probably don’t. They are armored up, and they may not be sharing this vulnerability with their friends, or sometimes even with their spouses or their family members.

Koren (00:22:41) – But here’s the thing I hear about it as their coach and in the work I do with people. Right? So I hear about it. I get the privilege of getting the unguarded information and people share this stuff with me. And on the outside how they may look and what’s going on the inside. Oftentimes there can be a disconnection and you wouldn’t know it. It’s oftentimes a big internal thing that’s going on. Being a perfectionist is a death by a thousand cuts. When my kids were little, they used to go around spouting Nobody’s Perfect from Hannah Montana. Let’s remember that nobody is perfect, and trying to be perfectionist doesn’t help you do the work you want to do, the meaningful work you want at the high level of being a high performer. Nor does it allow you to live the life of connected relationships that you desire and you deserve. All right, until next time. I’m smiling big for you. Hey, if you enjoy listening to this podcast, you’ll love my weekly emails. I know you’re thinking, Koren, really? Do I want another email in my overflowing inbox? Yes you do.

Koren (00:23:58) – Yippee skippy you do. These are short. They’re sweet. On Fridays, I send out the Friday podcast. It’s a great reminder that there’s a new show and it comes straight into your inbox of the latest episode. Awesome. You click on it, you go straight. Because we all need reminders. We have busy, full lives. And then on Sundays I have my Sunday Love column and these are emails I write from the heart. They’re filled with love. We need more love. We all do, myself included. These are short emails where you get a quick takeaway so you can incorporate this into your life, because people often want to know what to do and how to do it. And maybe sometimes it’s a story that you get. Or there’s like one time I wrote about the ten ways to practice gratitude, and that became such a great tool when one of the readers was struggling and the middle of the night, because it can be a scary place in our brains in the middle of the night.

Koren (00:24:58) – And she remembered the email that I sent about ten ways to practice gratitude. And she was able to practice gratitude and fall back asleep. And that was an awesome lesson for her to incorporate into her life. Go to the show notes, and there’s a link in the show notes where you can sign up and get these emails in your inbox.

Music (00:25:19) – She is dreaming, she is drifting. Never been so wide awake. Captured in the moment by the beauty all around her. There’s nowhere else that she would rather be.